Andrew Cooper
May 8, 2005    Caballo Loco Ranch, Pima Co., AZ (map)
46cm f/4.5 Deep Violet

Round, even halo with no structure, distinct core, sparse field, NGC5276 is 5' southeast

Harold Corwin

IC 895 = NGC 5273. Here is my previous note on the object:

...is lost -- unless it is an observation of NGC 5240. But neither Swift's description nor position fits the galaxy. In particular, the position is well off in both RA and Dec, and is not a digit error. Swift's comment "* in center ? D" (which Dreyer took to mean "sbM, D?"; could it be "* in center? D") does not fit N5240, either.

The other three nebulae that Swift found the night of 1 September 1888 don't help at all with possible systematic offsets. Only one, IC 511, is near its nominal position, and Swift got the direction of a nearby "wide D *" wrong -- it is northwest, not southeast as Swift has it. The other two objects (IC 1028 and IC 1045, both of which see) are nowhere near their catalogued positions, and IC 1045 may well be lost, too.

In August 2017, Steve Gottlieb suggested in an email that Swift's object has a -10 minute error in its RA, and that it is actually NGC 5273. The position is nearly an exact match to the NGC galaxy, and Swift's description -- in full, it reads "vF, pL, R, * in center ? D." -- is also appropriate. The "D" or "?D" remains a bit of a mystery unless, as Steve suggests, it refers to NGC 5276 just 3.4 arcminutes to the southeast. I wonder a bit about this -- the companion galaxy is far enough away to suggest that Swift might have mentioned it specifically if he had indeed seen it.

In any case, identical -10 arcminute errors in the postions for IC 1028 and IC 1045, and probably also in the RA for IC 511, all found by Swift on the same night, assure us that NGC 5273 is indeed the galaxy that he observed.

― IC Notes by Harold Corwin

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